According to the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of American women who have ever given birth to a child has once again fallen.
As per a report by US News, in 2015–2019, 52.1% of women aged 15 to 44 had ever given birth to a biological child, down from 54.9% in 2011–2015, according to data released by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics on January 10. (NCHS).
Also declining was the number of men becoming fathers. From 2015 to 2019, 39.7% of boys and men ages 15 to 44 fathered a child, compared to 43.8% between 2011 and 2015. The authors of the paper, Gladys Martinez and Kimberly Daniels, state that between 1976 and 2018, the average number of children born to a woman decreased from three to two.
By 2019, the typical woman between the ages of 15 and 49 had given birth to 1.33 children, while the average man had fathered 0.91 children. The majority of American women have their first kid later in life, according to a new survey.
In 2019, the average age of first-time mothers was approximately 24 years for women and 27 years for males, according to a report based on a national poll of almost 21,500 Americans aged 15 to 49. The likelihood of a woman having her first child by age 40 decreased from 83% in 2011–2015 to 81% in 2019. Men becoming fathers by age 40 also decreased, from 78% in 2011–2015 to 72% in 2019.
In fact, “delayed childbearing, defined as having a first child at age 35 or older,” grew by a factor of nine between 1972 and 2012, according to the authors. Since 1985, the overall birth rate among women in their forties has increased steadily.
According to the report, there are numerous reasons for these trends: better access to contraception, more women pursuing higher education, more women entering and remaining in the workforce, shifting family values, “relationship instability,” and concerns over personal finances and the high cost of raising children.
According to Martinez and Daniels, “having a first child at an older age is connected with beneficial effects on women’s salaries and career prospects.” They observed that having a kid in your 30s or 40s often signifies that your family has more financial resources, which can be beneficial to the health of your children.
It suggests that a woman’s level of education influences when she has her first kid. The survey indicated that the longer a woman attended school or college, the less likely she was to have her first child in her teens or twenties.
Obviously, fertility decreases with age, therefore, the trend toward later births has this “potentially negative consequence,” the scientists noted. The report also revealed an ongoing trend of Americans having children outside of marriage.
In 2019, “almost half of the first births [47.2%] happened before marriage, and half of all premarital first births occurred within cohabiting couples,” according to the researchers. These figures are comparable to those in the 2011–2015 report. The report indicated that births outside of marriage decreased as a woman’s wealth grew.
The National Health Statistics Report was released as an NCHS Data Brief on January 10.
